July 2017

One of the principal important configuration settings for running an Oracle database is making appropriate use of memory. Sizing the memory regions too small leads to increased IO, sizing the memory regions too big leads to inefficient use of memory and an increase in memory latency most notably because of swapping.

On Linux, there is a fair amount of memory information available, however it is not obvious how to use that information, which frequently leads to inefficient use of memory, especially in today’s world of consolidation.

The information about linux server database usage is available in /proc/meminfo, and looks like this:

This posting was prompted by a tweet from Kamil Stawiarski in response to a question about how he’d discovered the meaning of Redo Op Codes 5.1 and 11.6 – and credited me and Julian Dyke with “the hardest part”.

Over the years I’ve accumulated (from Julian Dyke, or odd MoS notes, etc.) and let dribble out the occasional interpretation of a few op codes – typically in response to a question on the OTN database forum or the Oracle-L listserver, and sometimes as a throwaway comment in a blog post, but I’ve never published the full set of codes that I’ve acquired (or guessed) to date.

The following is the text of an article I published in the UKOUG magazine several years ago (2010), but I came across it recently while writing up some notes for a presentation and thought it would be worth repeating here.

Fast Now, Fast Later

The title of this piece came from a presentation by Cary Millsap and captures an important point about trouble-shooting as a very memorable aphorism. Your solution to a problem may look good for you right now but is it a solution that will still be appropriate when the database has grown in volume and has more users.

I was actually prompted to write this article by a question on the OTN database forum that demonstrated the need for the basic combination of problem solving and forward planning. Someone had a problem with a fairly sudden change in performance of his system from November to December, and he had some samples from trace files and Statspack of a particular query that demonstrated the problem.

This is the second of two items that my mother typed out more than 25 years ago. I had very mixed emotions when reading it but ultimately I felt that it was a reminder that, despite all the nasty incidents and stupid behaviour hyped up by the press and news outlets, people and organisations are generally kinder, gentler and more understanding than they were 60 years ago.

This story is about the birth of my brother who was born with a genetic flaw now known as Trisomy 21 though formerly known as Down’s syndrome or (colloquially, and no longer acceptably) mongolism. It is the latter term that my mother uses as it was the common term at the time of birth and at the time she typed her story.

For quite a while I have been wanting to add Chinese support to some of the dbms_random functions, and this
last weekend I finally got some time to work a little bit on it. So now the library support Chinese output in functions in the
core_random package, text_random package and location_random package.

For quite a while I have been wanting to add Chinese support to some of the dbms_random functions, and this
last weekend I finally got some time to work a little bit on it. So now the library support Chinese output in functions in the
core_random package, text_random package and location_random package.